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Town Church: Besides the castle, the "old town church" still has many of the buildings dating from the 16th and 17th centuries, including the hall built for meetings of the Scottish Parliament and a good number of the town church houses occupied by nobles and burgesses who took part in its debates. Older still is the Church of St. Giles, the present building dating back to the 14th and 15th centuries; in this church John Knox preached and Jenny Geddes, a militant Presbyterian, is supposed to have thrown her stool at the officiating clergyman in 1637 before the signing of the National Covenant, which took place the following year at another Edinburgh church, Greyfriars.
Until 1834 the Congregational Church was paid for by town church taxes in Massachusetts; the Church of England is still technically a national church; until recently the Presbyterian Church was supported and controlled by Scotland; Roman Catholicism is still the national religion of a number of countries, such as Spain and Italy; the Russian Orthodox Church is the recognized state church of Russia; Mohammedanism is the established religion of Turkey and Pakistan; and so the list could grow.
Those who argue for an established church usually rest their case upon the necessity for a unified religious expression if the state is to be a unity. Those who argue against established churches maintain that public support of any religious group is a violation of individual rights and essentially a danger to personal liberty.
These remained die major divisions of the church until the Reformation of the 16th century. After this time many Christians of die Church of Rome separated into dissenting denominations or sects, each of which came to be known as a particular church (Anglican Church; Presbyterian Church; Methodist Church). Each remained widiin die Christian tradition but proclaimed a distinctive creed and ritual. Similar divisions within the Eastern Church emerged as die Armenian Church, the Coptic Church, and the Orthodox Church. |
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